No WMD were used in 2003, but the threat posed by them was enough to initiate a preemptive war against Iraq, create confrontations between the international community and Iran and North Korea, and inspire the creation of a new multinational partnership to combat proliferation.

Iraq

After a four-year hiatus, UN weapons inspectors returned to Iraq in November 2002 to verify whether Saddam Hussein’s regime had eliminated all of its stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction (WMD; seeSidebar) and programs to develop them. By the beginning of March 2003, the United States and the United Kingdom had grown exasperated with the lack of progress and declared the diplomatic process over. Weeks of covert missions by special forces preceded a U.S.-led multinational campaign comprising more than 160,000 troops—dubbed Operation Iraqi Freedom—which began on March 19 when air strikes rocked the capital, Baghdad. U.S. and British ground forces then invaded from Kuwait. British troops concentrated on taking the main southern city of Basra while U.S. troops advanced toward Baghdad in two main thrusts; the marines from the southeast and the 3rd Infantry Division from the southwest. Fierce resistance was encountered in Nasiriyah and other towns. Baghdad fell to U.S. troops on April 9, and the focus of actions then moved to northern Iraq, where U.S.-backed Kurdish forces took control of Kirkuk and Mosul before Saddam’s hometown of Tikrit fell to U.S. forces on April 14. U.S. Pres. George W. Bush declared an end to “major combat operations” on May 1. At that point 116 U.S. and 33 U.K. service members had been killed in action, along with 4,000–6,000 Iraqi military personnel and an unknown number of civilians.

As occupying powers, the U.S. and U.K. established the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) under the leadership of retired U.S. Lieut. Gen. Jay Garner. He was removed from office after one month, however, and replaced by Paul Bremer. (SeeBiographies.) Garner later admitted the coalition had made mistakes by not restoring order in Iraq quickly enough. By July a provisional Iraqi Interim Governing Council (IGC) had been established under the direction of the CPA.

In the months following Bush’s declaration of an end to hostilities, attacks on coalition forces became bloodier and more frequent, often numbering more than 30 a day. These were typically ambushes involving rocket-propelled grenades and improvised explosive devices. By year’s end a total of 480 American military personnel had been killed and more than 2,700 wounded in both combat and noncombat incidents. Civilians and Iraqi police were also increasingly targeted by anticoalition forces, and the UN and the International Committee of the Red Cross pulled out most of their staffs after fatal bomb attacks. The UN special representative, Sérgio Vieira de Mello, was among the casualties (seeObituaries), and other coalition members—Bulgaria, Colombia, Denmark, Italy, Japan, Poland, South Korea, Spain, Thailand, and Ukraine—also suffered fatalities.

Saddam was taken into custody without a fight by U.S. forces on December 13. (SeeBiographies.) He was found hiding in a “spider hole” at a farmhouse near his hometown of Tikrit. Despite intense searching by the coalition, no evidence of WMD had been found by year’s end.

WMD, Arms Control, and Disarmament

France revised its nuclear strategy by targeting nuclear missiles at “rogue states” that had WMD. Previously the French strategy had been founded on the principle of deterrence against declared nuclear powers. The change aligned France with the U.S. and the U.K. In response to a request from the Pentagon, the U.S. Senate voted to lift a decade-old ban on the development of smaller nuclear weapons, referred to as “mininukes,” for use in destroying deeply buried or fortified facilities where WMD could be stored by enemy states or terrorists. The U.S.-Russia Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty, known as the Moscow Treaty, entered into force in June. Both sides pledged to reduce the number of their operationally deployed strategic nuclear warheads to 1,700–2,200 by the end of 2012.

Representatives of more than 150 countries met to assess global progress toward eliminating all chemical weapons. It was the first review conference of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons since an international ban on such weapons came into force in 1997. The U.S. met the treaty’s deadline for destroying 20% of its chemical weapons ahead of schedule, while Russia barely managed to fulfill its 1% quota (about 400 metric tons) before the conference got under way.

The first international military exercise on intercepting shipments of WMD occurred in September off the northeastern coast of Australia. It was organized by the Proliferation Security Initiative, set up in May by President Bush to counter suspected trade in WMD and related components. Members of the initiative were Australia, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, The Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain, the U.K., and the U.S.

Other Conflicts

Russia

More than 50 people were killed in the suicide bombing of a government building in the north of the Republic of Chechnya in May. Two days later Akhmad Kadyrov, head of the Russian-appointed administration, narrowly escaped another suicide attack that left more than a dozen dead. Chechen separatists extended their struggle to neighbouring areas as well. Approximately 20 military personnel were killed when a suicide bomber blew up a bus in the North Ossetian Republic. Another suicide bomb attack, this time on a military hospital in the Russian town of Mozdok, near the Chechen border, killed 50 people on August 1.

Latin America

During the year some 800 members of the right-wing United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) disarmed. The AUC said all its 13,000 paramilitaries would do so by the end of 2005. Colombia’s two most powerful leftist rebel groups—the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN)—announced that they would join forces. In March the Venezuelan army bombed Colombian armed groups operating on its territory. Both countries later agreed to increase security along their common border.

Click anywhere inside the article to add text or insert superscripts, subscripts, and special characters.
You can also highlight a section and use the tools in this bar to modify existing content:

Add links to related Britannica articles!
You can double-click any word or highlight a word or phrase in the text below and then select an article from the search box.
Or, simply highlight a word or phrase in the article, then enter the article name or term you'd like to link to in the search box below, and select from the list of results.

Note: we do not allow links to external resources in editor.
Please click the Web sites link for this article to add citations for
external Web sites.